I remember September 25, 1967, as if it were yesterday. Charles
Honorton telephoned me from Durham, North Carolina, telling me that he
had decided to accept Montague Ullman's offer of a research
position at our Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in
Brooklyn. I had joined Ullman in 1964, and several of our articles on
ESP and dreams had been published (e.g., Ullman, Krippner, &
Feldstein, 1966). Honorton had already gained a solid reputation in
parapsychology with his studies involving the hypnotic preparation of
percipients for psi tasks (e.g., Honorton, 1965) and psi and creativity
test scores (e.g., Honorton, 1967).

After several years of pilot studies in the area of telepathy and
dreams, Ullman had launched the Maimonides Dream Laboratory in 1962
where the monitoring of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep could be
incorporated into a psi-task design. These studies paired a volunteer
subject with a "telepathic transmitter"; the pair interacted
briefly, then separated and spent the night in distant rooms. An
experimenter randomly selected an art print (from a collection or
"pool") and gave the print to the transmitter in an apaque
sealed envelope, to be opened only when the transmitter was in the
distant room. The experimenter awakened the subject near the end of each
REM period and requested a dream report. These reports were transcribed
and sent to outside judges who, working independently, matched them
against the pool of potential art prints from which the actual print had
been randomly selected. Statistical evaluation was based on the average
of these matchings, as well as by self-judgings of the percipients at
the conclusion of the experiment. Precautions were taken to prevent
sensory cues or fraudulent subject/transmitter collaboration from
influencing the dream reports or the statistical results.

One example of a finding in an experiment that obtained
statistically significant results occurred on a night when the randomly
selected art print was "School of the Dance" by Degas,
depicting a dance class of several young women. The subject was William
Erwin, a psyhoanalysts; his dream reports included such phrases as
"I was in a class made up of maybe half a dozen people; it felt
like a school." "There was one little girl that was trying to
dance with me." An examination of the dream reports and the matched
art prints indicates a similarity in this process to the way day
residue, psychodynamic processes, and subliminally perceived stimuli
find their way into dream content. Sometimes the material corresponding
to the art prints was intrusive (for example, "There was one little
girl that was trying to dance with me"), and sometimes it blended
easily with the narrative (for example, "It felt like a
school"). At times it was direct, at other times symbolic (Ullman
& Krippner, 1970, p. 78).

Honorton joined us as we were concluding a study with a prominent
psychologist and parapsychologist, Robert L. Van de Castle (1977), whose
eight-night ESP dream study was accompanied by psychodynamically
oriented, in-depth interviews with Ullman each morning (Krippner &
Ullman, 1970). Not only did Van de Castle obtain the most robust
statistical results of any of the percipients, but the interviews
provided another dimension to the experience. For example, on one night
the target was Rousseau's "Repast of the Lion," which
depicts a lion feeding on its kill of a smaller animal. After a night
filled with dreams about an attempted strangulation, karate chops, a
suicide, and fighting dogs, Van de Castle surmised that the target would
contain aggression, "but the aggression would have to be in some
kind of disguise" (Ullman & Krippner, with Vaughan, 1989, p.
112). The psychoanalytic interview probed, not only the way aggression
came into the dreams, but also why Van de Castle postulated "some
kind of disguise."

Honorton (1972b) set to work completing a clairvoyance study with
hypnotically induced imagery or "hypnotic dreams." He divided
60 percipients into two equal groups, one of which received a hypnotic
induction and one of which received instructions to facilitate
imagination. The suggestibility level of all the percipients had been
ascertained by a standardized test, and there was little difference
between the two groups. However, Honorton had selected the percipients
so that there would be 10 persons in each of 6 groups: a
high-suggestible hypnosis group, a high-suggestible imagination group, a
medium-suggestible hypnosis group, a medium-suggestible imagination
group, a low-suggestible hypnosis group, and a low-suggestible
imagination group.

For all percipients, a sealed envelope containing an art print was
placed on the arm of each subject's chair. The hypnosis percipients
were told, "You are going to have a dream, a very vivid and
realistic dream about the target in the envelope." The imagination
percipients were told, "You are going to have a daydream, a very
vivid and realistic daydream about the target in the envelope."
This procedure was repeated four times as four randomly selected
pictures were used per subject. Later, in interviews, the percipients
described the quality of their dreams or daydreams and the degree to
which they felt their consciousness had been altered.

The percipients evaluated their own material immediately after
their interview was over. Only the high-suggestible hypnosis group
attained statistically significant results. It was observed that the
hypnosis (but not the imagination) percipients who described their
dreams as "like watching a film" or "as though I was in a
dream world" did significantly better at the task than those
percipients who said they were "just thinking." Finally, the
percipients in the hypnosis (but not the imagination) group who reported
major alterations in consciousness did significantly better that those
reporting little change.

One of the percipients in the hypnosis group was Felicia Parise, a
hematologist working at Maimonides. One of her target pictures was
Hiroshige's painting "The Kinryuszan Temple," which
portrays a red and gold ceremonial lantern hanging down from a temple
doorway. Parise reported:

a room with party decorations. . . . I saw a gold chest, like a
pirate's chest,

but shining and new. The party decorations were colorful. No
decorations

on the floor, they were on the ceiling and walls. There was a table

with things on it. Red balloons, red punch bowls. (p. 96) When
asked to associate to her hypnotic dream, Parise recalled her
"sweet sixteen" birthday party at which her parents had strung
party decorations of Japanese lanters. A few weeks later, Parise brought
a photograph of that party to Honorton; it bore a striking resemblance
to the Hiroshige painting.

Honorton and I (Honorton & Krippner, 1969) agreed that hypnotic
induction provides one of the few available techniques for affecting the
level of psi performance. But is this due to the demand characteristics
of the situation, the subject's preconceived ideas about hypnosis,
or some factor specific to hypnotic induction itself and the condition
it evokes? Honorton (1977) was to explore these issues further in what
he referred to as "internal attention states," those
conditions in which "conscious awareness is maintained in the
absence of patterned exteroceptive and proprioception information. These
conditions include spontaneously generated states, such as hypnagogic
reverie, as well as those which are deliberately induced, such as
meditation and hypnosis" (p. 435). Honorton surveyed the available
data and suggested an empirical generalization: "Psi functioning is
enhanced (i.e., is more easily detected and recognized) when the
receiver is in a state of sensory relaxation and is minimally influenced
by ordinary perception and proprioception (p. 466; italics in original).
For Honorton, the evidence lent support to a "filter theory"
of the mind. As Aldous Huxley (1963) so eloquently put it: "To make
biological survival possible, Mind at large has to be funneled through
the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system" (p. 23).
Honorton and other parapsychologists always have been challenged to find
ways to bypass this filter, obtaining information or exerting influence
that transcend ordinary constraints of time, space, and energy.

During his years at Maimonides, Honorton also pursued his interest
in studying the effects of immediate feedback on psi scoring. He used
card-guessing tasks, alternating runs with no feedback with runs
involving immediate feedback on each guess. In general, the runs
involving immediate feedback obtained higher scores when compared to the
previous runs with no feedback (e.g., Honorton, 1970). However, the
results were not clear-cut enough to support an interpretation
compatible with learning theory (Palmer, 1978, p. 185). A more clear-cut
finding was Honorton's (1972a) survey of dream recall; he was the
first to present convincing data that people who remember their dreams
tend to obtain higher scores on ESP tests.

Honorton was also instrumental in inaugurating studies of alpha
rhythm biofeedback at Maimonides. He (Honorton, 1969) was one of the
first to report a fragile but intriguing relationship between alpha
activity and ESP performance, and he later took this work a step further
(Honorton, Davidson, & Bindler, 1971). Instead of relaxation, he and
his colleagues used the biofeedback technique to generate alpha; they
compared ESP scores during this period with a period in which alpha was
suppressed by the same method. Self-reports were used to rate change of
consciousness during the session. Percipients with the highest
self-reports during the generation of alpha also produced the highest
ESP scoring rate. Those who produced the greatest subjective shift in
consciousness during alpha generation obtained significantly higher ESP
scores than those reporting only minor shifts. Later, Honorton (1975)
proposed that relatively large and rapid shifts in one's conscious
state would be associated with enhanced ESP performance; this
observation was to evolve and change, but it guided Honorton's
development as an astute researcher and led to some of his most
important contributions.

The Malcolm Bessent Studies

One morning in 1969, I had a telephone call from Arthur Young,
inventor of the Bell helicopter and president of the Foundation for the
Study of Consciousness. Young asked me if we would be interested in
initiating a formal study of Malcolm Bessent, an Englishman who had
reported spontaneous precognitive dreams over the years. We agreed and
were assisted by Donald C. Webster, a Canadian industrialist, in
bringing Bessent from England for a summer of experimental work.
Initially, Honorton (Honorton, 1971b) had Bessent guess which of two
colored lights would next be lighted by an electronically controlled
random number generator. Both Bessent's predictions and his
"hits" were automatically registered. The total number of
trials was set in advance: 15,360. There were 7,859 "hits,"
179 more than expected by chance, with odds against coincidence on the
order of 500 to 1.

Honorton joined Ullman and me (Krippner, Ullman, & Honorton,
1971) in designing an eight-night study that would test Bessent's
purported abilities in a situation closer to his spontaneous dreams that
purportedly matched future events. Once Bessent's last dream had
been collected for the night, an elaborate random number system was used
to choose a word from Hall and Van de Castle's (1966) manual,
Content Analysis of Dreams; this, in turn, was matched with an art print
from our collection, and a multisensory experience was designed around
it--all after Bessent had awakened. The experimenters who designed the
experience had not been present during the night, and the experimenters
who had monitored the electroencephalograph (EEG) were not present
during the designing or execution of the multisensory event.

For example, on one night, Bessent dreamed about "a concrete
building," "a patient from upstairs escaping," "a
white coat. . . , like a doctor's coat," and "doctors and
medical people." The randomly selected word on the following
morning was corridor, and the matching art print was Van Gogh's
painting "Hospital Corridor at St. Remy." When Bessent was
ushered out of the sleep room, he was met by a man wearing a white
doctor's coat daubed with acetone, and was greeted as "Mr. Van
Gogh." He was given a pill with a glass of water, and was led
through a darkened corridor to a room where he was presented with
paintings by mental patients as well as the Van Gogh art print while, in
the background, hysterical laughter and music from a film about a mental
hospital could be heard. The outside judges were able to match
Bessent's dreams with an account of the "corridor"
experience at high levels, giving him a "direct hit." He
obtained five other "direct hits" during the study and two
"hits" with more moderate scores. If chance had produced these
results, one would have to have carried out 5,000 additional
experiments.

The results of his experiment were so extraordinary that critics
seemed unable to grasp the protocol. For example, Zusne and Jones (1982)
imply that at least one of the experimenters had a chance to know the
identity of the target. The authors state: "After the subject falls
asleep, an art reproduction is selected from a large collection
randomly, placed in an envelope, and given to the agent" (pp.
260-261). In fact, the target was already in the envelope at the time
the session began, having been placed there by a person who was not
present during the night. Zusne and Jones write that "three . . .
judges rate their confidence that the dream content matches the target
picture," implying that the judges knew the identity of the target
while making their evaluations. In reality, each judge was presented
with a dream transcript and a pool of potential targets and was asked to
evaluate the degree of similarity between the transcript and each target
in the pool. These misrepresentations pale by comparison with an
assertion that research participants were "primed prior to going to
sleep" so that they could better incorporate the target material in
their dreams. It is claimed that they were "primed" through
the experimenter's

preparing the receiver through experiences that were related to the

content of the picture to be telepathically transmitted during the
night.

Thus, when the picture was Van Gogh's Corridor of the St. Paul
Hospital

[sic], which depicts a lonely figure in the hallway of a mental
hospital,

the receiver: (1) heard Rosza's Spellbound played on a
phonograph;

(2) heard the monitor laugh hysterically in the room; (3) was
addressed

as "Mr. Van Gogh" by the monitor; (4) was shown paintings
done by

mental patients; (5) was given a pill and a glass of water; and (6)
was

daubed with a piece of cotton dipped in acetone. The receiver was
an

English sensitive," but it is obvious that no psychic
sensitivity was required

to figure out the general content of the picture and to produce

an appropriate report, whether any dreams were actually seen or
not.

(pp. 260-261) In actuality, rather than being "primed,"
Bessent was not shown the Van Gogh painting until after his dreams had
been monitored and tape recorded. Indeed, when he was shown the Van Gogh
painting, he exclaimed, "My Cod--that's my dream!"

Bessent returned during the summer of 1970 for another precognition
study (Krippner, Ullman, & Honorton, 1972). This time, a target pool
was prepared by an experimenter who planned to be in Europe while the
entire study was run. He prepared 10 slide-and-sound sequences on the
topics of "authoritarian signs," "beards,"
"birds," "crucifixion," "death,"
"Egyptain art," "police," "saints," and
"2001." Each slide collection, made up of from 10 to 22
slides, was accompanied by 10 minutes of appropriate music or sound
effects that Bessent could listen to with stereophonic headphones. The
materials were placed in boxes that were numbered, taped, and sealed.

The 16 nights of the study were arranged in pairs so that on the
first night Bessent would attempt to dream precognitively about the
target sequence he would experience the next night, and on that night he
would attempt to dream more conventionally about the sequence he had
just seen. Thus, on the odd-numbered nights he would dream about the
future and on the even-numbered nights he would dream about the past. As
an additional control, the EEG technicians who monitored Bessent's
sleep and dreams were psychology students from New York University who
knew little about the experimental design. The target was selected the
following evening, some 12 hours after the tape recording of
Bessent's dreams had been mailed to the transcriber.

The results of this study were again significant, with five
"direct hits" and two more moderate "hits." On the
control nights, there were no "direct hits"; only when
"death" was the topic, did a control night (in which Bessent
dreamed about the past) obtain higher scores than an experimental night
(when Bessent attempted to dream about the future). One night, Bessent
dreamed about "people in motor uniforms," "conflict
between students and the armed guard,"five hundred National
Guardsmen," and "a police state." The slide-and-sound
sequence for that night was "police." On the control night,
Bessent mentioned "some sort of conflict" but had no other
dreams that matched the target.

Taken together, the two Bessent dream studies have lent
experimental credence to the precognition hypothesis. Bessent appeared
to dream precognitively 14 out of 16 times in experiments that were
tightly controlled against subliminal clues, sensory leakage, or fraud.
And Honorton (1974b) observed: "It appears at least for this
subject that extrasensory stimuli may be more easily incorporated into
dreams than sensory stimuli" (p. 624).

Additional ESP Dream Studies

Honorton was a valued co-experimenter in the additional studies we
conducted on dreams and ESP at Maimonides. In one of them, Alan Vaughan
was a subject partly because of a letter I received from him on June 4,
1968. Writing from Freiburg, Germany, Vaughan cited several dreams that
he felt might be premonitory of Robert Kennedy's being murdered in
the near future. I immediately discussed this letter with Honorton, and
the next day we were saddened by Kennedy's assassination.

Vaughan and three other percipients each spent eight nights in the
Dream laboratory. A transmitter concentrated on the same target for four
nights, then on a different art print for every REM period during each
of the remaining four nights. The latter condition appeared to be
superior, especially for Felicia Parise whose ratings of her dreams
against the targets were independently significant (Honorton, Krippner,
& Ullman, 1971).

For the next study, the transmitter was moved to the Foundation for
Mind Research, a research center located 14 miles from Maimonides and
equipped with facilities for providing the agent with a controlled
audio-visual "sensory bombardment" experience. Four nights and
eight percipients were involved, one of the percipants being Alan
Vaughan. Such thematic sequences as "Oriental Religion" and
"Space Exploration" evoked eight "hits" and no
misses," and yielded highly significant results (Krippner,
Honorton, Ullman, Masters, & Houston, 1971). However, an attempted
replication of this design produced only chance results (Foulkes,
Belvedere, Masters, Houston, Krippner, Honorton, & Ullman, 1972).

A variation of sensory bombardment was involved for a six-night
study in which the transmitters consisted of about 2,000 musical fans
attending rock concerts that featured "The Grateful Dead"
(Krippner, Honorton, & Ullman, 1973). While the rock band played,
the audience viewed a slide sequence for 15 minutes, attempting to
transmit the contents of a randomly selected art print (projected on a
giant screen, along with instructions) to Malcolm Bessent located at the
Dream Laboratory some 45 miles distant. Felicia Parise, sleeping at
home, served as a control subject. The judges' scores for Bessent
were marginally significant; those for Parise were not.

The final ESP-dream study carried out at the Maimonides Dream
Laboratory before we closed our doors in 1978 involved a comparison of
ESP and pre-sleep influences on dreams (Honorton, Ullman, &
Krippner, 1975). Target stimuli were four films, two of them emotionally
toned and two of them neutral. On each of the first two experimental
nights, a transmitter was shown a different film, and the percipient
tried to dream about it. On the two pre-sleep nights, the percipient
viewed the films before falling asleep. Forty percipient-transmitter
pairs were involved; percipients making high scores on personality tests
measuring field independence" obtained significantly higher scores
for the emotional films than for the neutral films in the ESP condition.
Neither type of film was incorporated into dreams at a significant level
on the ESP nights. However, the pre-sleep nights yielded significant
incorporation scores.

This finding may have been a disappointment for parapsychologists,
but it supported some preliminary findings in sleep psychology. Shortly
before we initiated our studies at Maimonides, Witkin and Lewis (1967)
showed percipients an emotionally threatening film before they went to
sleep, for example, a monkey hauling her dead baby about by the limbs
while nibbling at it, or an Australian aboriginal puberty rite in which
an incision was made across the surface of an initiate's penis with
a sharp stone. Witkin and Lewis observed that there were no direct
incorporations of film content, but that their judges were able to find
elements of the film in the dream reports, often in disguised, symbolic
form.

Had this been a parapsychological study, the researchers would
never have been taken seriously. They would have been accused of the
possible cueing of the percipients' responses, of projecting their
expectations while collecting the dream reports, and (because blind
judging was not used) of "reading" purported symbolism into
the dream content. However, Witkin and Lewis's study did not study
anomalous phenomena; hence, a less than rigorous approach appears to
have been permissible. In the case of parapsychology, however, it is
often pointed out that claims of extraordinary phenomena require
extraordinary proof; for parapsychological studies to be taken
seriously, their data need to be scrupulously collected and carefully
evaluated. We were pleased that our data, collected and evaluated at a
more rigorous level, supported Witkin and Lewis's earlier claims.

In another influential study, dream reports were collected from
patients who were about to undergo surgery; the investigators claimed
that the upcoming operation was featured symbolically in the
patients' dreams (Breger, Hunter, & Lane, 1971). However, the
investigators who collected the dream reports were well aware of the
type of surgery each patient was facing. They easily could have found
specific relationships between dream content and the scheduled
operation, given the vagueness and variety of dream symbols. Again, this
was not a parapsychological experiment and therefore there was little
criticism of this study's obvious flaws.

To evaluate whether or not our target/transcript correspondences
were due to chance, we sent copies of the dream reports and post-sleep
associations to three outside judges who worked blind and independently.
All judges had worked previously with dream reports and/or with
"free response" parapsychological material (in which the
variety of potential targets is unlimited rather than circumscribed).
Each judge was sent copies or duplicate sets of the targets used in the
study; no judge was sent the actual target that had been used because it
might have been possible that a smudge or written note on the picture
would have cued the judge that someone had been concentrating upon that
particular item. The averages of the judges' evaluations were used
as data for statistical analysis.

In 1985, Child published a meta-analysis of the Maimonides studies.
He found that the only form in which the data were available for all
series of sessions was a count of "hits" and
"misses." If the actual target was ranked or rated in the
upper half of the target pool for similarity to the dreams and the
post-sleep interview, the outcome was considered a hit. If the actual
target was placed in the lower half of the pool, the outcome was
considered a miss. Parapsychological experiments are often criticized on
the grounds that the evidence they provide for psi phenomena is gleaned
from very small effects detectable only when large bodies of data are
amassed. Child pointed out that the Maimonides experiments are exempt
from this criticism; significant results from some studies are
attributable to just 8 data points each, that is, a total of 16 dream
transcripts. All told, the Maimonides data were statistically
significant to the extent that there was only one chance in 1,000 that
coincidence could have accounted for the results.

Various types of criticism have been leveled against the Maimonides
experiments from the time of our first publications in scientific
journals. The most serious problem is that several other laboratories
have not been able to replicate our effects when they followed our basic
design. In one psychology text, Neher (1980) stated:

A. . .series of studies of great interest are the dream-telepathy
tests

done at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York, in which, it is

claimed, dreams are influenced telepathically. However, some other
investigators

have failed to obtain similar results. One unsuccessful replication

used a subject who was "successful" in the Maimonides
studies;

another was conducted by the Maimonides investigators themselves.
(p.

145) It is certainly the case that some of our own replication
attempts failed and that an independent attempt to replicate our work
with Van de Castle did not support the psi hypothesis (Belvedere &
Foulkes, 1971).

Nevertheless, our dream studies at Maimonides played a small but
vital role in parapsychological inquiry and the search for knowledge.
Perhaps our data base and our research protocols will be a continuing
source of material for serious researchers who are attempting to
encompass the study of anomalous phenomena within the scientific
enterprise. If so, future investigators will recognize the vital role
played by Charles Honorton in bringing these studies to fruition.

Psychokinesis and Sensory Deprivation

Although our laboratory was best known for its work in ESP and
dreams (Krippner, 1991), Honorton initiated some provocative PK studies.
Honorton and Barksdale (1972) tested their subjects with a random number
generator (RNG), comparing conditions of muscular tension versus
relaxation, and also active concentration versus passive attention to
the target. Honorton conducted the first series in which the six
subjects worked as a group to influence the RNG. Before one half of the
runs, they were given suggestions to induce relaxation; before the other
half, suggestions were given for sustained muscular tension.
Relaxed-state scores were nonsignificant, but the tension scores were
highly significant, especially in those trials that combined muscle
tension with passive attention to the task.

In the second series, which Barksdale conducted, 10 subjects tried
individually to influence the RNG under the same conditions; their
scores were nonsignificant. Barksdale then served as experimenter for a
third series in which Honorton served as the subject. The score for each
condition was highly significant, that for tension being positive and
that for relaxation almost equally negative. In commenting on this
experiment, Rush (1977) says that "Honorton's remarkable
success in the third series raises the most vexing ambiguity of all, the
covert role of the experimenter" (p. 64).

Ullman and I had both visited parapsychologists in the Soviet
Union, and were delighted when a friend offered to show our staff a film
featuring alleged PK in that country. Felicia Parise observed the film
and was inspired to undertake several weeks of persistent practice,
eventually seeming to move small objects and rotate a compass needle.
Ullman and I observed some of these feats under informal conditions, but
Honorton (1974a) made a careful investigation of the phenomena,
eventually taking Parise to the Foundation for Research on the Nature of
Man, his former place of employment. According to the researchers in
Durham (Watkins & Watkins, 1974), Parise deflected a compass needle,
altered the signal from a metal detector, and produced anomalous effects
on photographic film.

The directors of the Foundation for Mind Research had constructed a
"witches' cradle" which was based on medieval sensory
deprivation devices. There are historical accounts of cradle-like
contraptions in which so-called witches suspended themselves from trees.
Upon being covered with a sheath and after ingesting (or being coated
with) belladonna, thorn apple, or some other mind-altering substance,
the adept would have out-of-body experiences and other unusual
adventures. The modern version of this cradle is a metal swing in which
the subject stands upright, supported by broad bands of canvas. He or
she wears earplugs to eliminate outside sound, and opaque goggles to
eliminate visual stimuli. The swing acts as a pendulum, carrying the
subject from side to side and rotating in response to involuntary
movements.

Harry Hermon, a psychiatrist practicing at Maimonides, lent us his
cradle for our study (Honorton, Drucker, & Hermon, 1973). Thirty
percipients participated in the study; they were told that a transmitter
in a distant room would view an art print during the last 10 minutes of
the session. They were also taught the self-report scale that Honorton
had devised to quickly evaluate alterations in consciousness. About 63%
of the percipients in the study obtained "hits," a result that
is not quite statistically significant. However, the subjects with high
self-reports obtained a significant number of "hits." Further,
the average shift in self-reports from the first 10 minutes to the last
10 minutes was higher for those making "hits" than for those
making "misses."

This difference supported Gardner Murphy's (1966) hypothesis
that shifts in consciousness are favorable to the emergence of psi.
Murphy was pleased to hear the news. He had procured the original
funding for the Dream Laboratory from the Ittleson and Scaife
Foundations and had recommended me to Ullman once the laboratory needed
a director. Murphy's hypothesis on shifts of consciousness was
among several factors that stimulated Honorton's continued interest
in partial sensory deprivation as one of many conditions that could
produce a psi-conducive state characterized by a withdrawal of attention
from the external world and a shift toward internal thoughts and images.
After reading about a study of thought patterns and imagery during sleep
onset (Vogel, Foulkes, & Trosman, 1966) and after recalling that
stilling the mind, or reducing the internal noise level, is the object
of self-regulated concentration in Patanjali's system of Raja yoga,
Honorton developed an innovative procedure known as the ganzfeld, a
German term denoting a "uniform visual field."

In this procedure, research percipients were asked to relax in a
soundproof room with halved pingpong balls fastened over their eyes. A
colored light was placed 6 inches in front of their face, and a
recording of seashore sounds was played through headphones. This method
had been used earlier by Bertini, Lewis, and Witkin (1972) in an attempt
to study the effect of emotional-involving films on hypnagogic
imagery--in which the incorporated material was found to be more direct
and less symbolic (Bertini, Lewis, & Witkin, 1972). The major
procedural difference made in Honorton's study was that, rather
than a presleep stimulus, a transmitter in a distant room was
concentrating on randomly selected target material.

Following the session, Honorton's percipients inspected a
duplicate set of four possible target materials, choosing the one they
felt corresponded most closely to their thoughts and images. They ranked
the other three as well, allowing all data to be categorized on a
"hit" or "miss" basis. As there was a different
target pool and a different percipient for each session, the problem of
independence in judging was virtually eliminated. Since Honorton's
(Honorton & Harper, 1974) original report, successful ganzfeld
experiments have been reported from a number of different laboratories.
Between 50% and 60% of these ganzfeld studies have produced significant
data (Stanford, 1984)--a result that fulfills the promise of the high
psi yield in the "twilight states" investigated at Maimonides.

The ganzfeld work will stand as Charles Honorton's most
important contribution to parapsychological research. However, there
were many other parts of the Honorton legacy, both in the laboratory, in
the research literature, and in the politics of responding to critics of
psi research. When Honorton arrived at Maimonides, I (Krippner, 1975)
referred to him as "Just about the most capable experimenter in the
field" (p. 59). I have never regretted my enthusiastic evaluation;
indeed, it has been reinforced over the years. I will miss him as a
colleague and as a friend. And where will parapsychology find another of
his stature?